I have no idea what being deaf would actually be like.

There’s plenty of resources out there if you ever become curious about how Deaf people live, accessibility for Deaf people, or what Deaf culture is like or how it intersects with this or that. I try to share the interesting things I stumble upon, I even suggested making a /c/deaf here on Hexbear and this suggestion was met well — but it seems like progress on making that community a reality has stalled, unfortunately.

Suppose I could sign words to stim.

I already now stim by fingerspelling random words or phrases I hear or see or that pop into my head, so you don’t need to be Deaf to do this, necessarily. For me I find this is a nice way to quench the urge of vocal stims without being too noisy, and I get to practice fingerspelling to boot.

Deaf people do generally place some limits on how hearing people can use sign languages, but I don’t think what I’m doing with my stimming is a faux pas, necessarily. I’ve only heard Deaf people complain about things that are really pretty obvious like “don’t teach a sign language if it’s not your first language”, “don’t interpret without a certification”, and “don’t give yourself a sign name, nor beg Deaf people to give you one” — or, I say these things are “obvious”, but there are still myriad criminally unqualified hearies teaching broken sign, myriad Thamsanqa Jantjies going “HELLO CIRCLE SMOKING doaisjdasfnadaskda CIRCLE SMOKING HELLO SMOKING HELLO CIRCLE aduhuasdanssz”, and myriad hearies being exactly as annoying to Deaf people about getting a sign name, as they probably also are to Natives about getting a “sacred indigenous spiritual name, preferably something to do with hawks or eagles because they’re cool”.

I’d never really thought about going deaf before, thank you.

Most people don’t, but I do think it is something that’s worth thinking about more often. I think that Deaf people are often kind of neglected in leftist spaces, and I think this is a shame, because Deaf people have a lot of struggles that should be fought for in solidarity by hearing people, and that hearing people of different marginalized groups can see themselves in and learn from. I think that a part of remedying the lack of awareness or consideration for Deaf people might be for people to better understand that anyone can become deaf, and that you might’ve even met a Deaf person before without realizing — I myself met a Deaf woman who I didn’t realize was Deaf literally for months, despite seeing her basically every day, because she fully hid her CI behind her hair and she didn’t open up to anyone about being Deaf for fear of the hearies being weird about it. I learned my lesson then and there that even if I had unlearned the “cishet is default” attitude, that I still had not unlearned the equally harmful “hearing is default” attitude. Audist society is set up in such a way that for the hearing, the Deaf are “out of sight, out of mind” — that is, like many other marginalized groups, the Deaf are turned into a one-or-two-sentence abstract concept to be at most debated between members of the hegemonic group, or more often wholly unacknowledged. This is my thought, and this is why it’s important to fight against the “hearing is default” attitude and the thought patterns this attitude manifests as.